Sounds like Facebook made a mistake changing their expected IPO price from $28~$35 to $34~$38 The big banks stepped in to save face, which makes a mockery of all the talk about "intense demand from retail investors"

The big banks didn't step in to save face. They bought all this stock so they could dump it on unsuspecting nitwits who want to own shares of facebook. People see in the news that Facebook is worth 100 billion and they want in. The problem is after the initial offering the price is just going to go down, down, down, like all other dotcom IPOs. This is because all of these big banks are just buying in to sell off and make some money on clueless "investors".

You know what a real waste of time is...websites. Mailing lists will suffice for getting out information and news like Slashdot. Retail sites can just email you a catalog and if you want to buy something you just email them back. Obviously email solves all of our problems. While we are at it we should get rid of text messaging, twitter, and instant messaging. It can all be solved with email. Sure it isn't as elegant, usable, or sophisticated as other solutions for various problems but it gets the job done...right?

But once you get to the tipping point of putting more heat into the system than can be bled off, the temperature will continue to rise as long as the input is higher than that point

Considering how long the Earth has been orbiting the sun I think we reached that point a long time ago. Either that or you think the Earth is going to keep getting hotter until it reaches the temperature of the sun, which is ludicrously stupid.

What crime did Zimmerman observe Trayvon committing?

I would call the police and let them handle it. I certainly wouldn't shoot and kill and unarmed teen on simple suspicion of burglary. There is no defense for what Zimmerman did. It's outrageous that people are even implying it. This has nothing to do with Zimmerman being a racist to me, even though it may still turn out that he is a racist (he may have uttered the word "coon" for example). This is about killing an unarmed person and NOT EVEN HAVING A TRIAL. That's the issue here. That was the issue to begin with and that is the real racism being displayed by this case. If a black guy shot and killed an unarmed person you can be sure there would be a trial and most likely he would go to jail for a long time.

Dash is the default in Ubuntu and Debian but that's about it. I don't know of any other major Linux distribution that defaults to it. Clang still has a long way to go. It still cannot compile some programs that GCC can and the binaries made from GCC tend to be faster even if the build process is not.

XP wasn't a substantial update of 2000. It couldn't have been. It came out shortly after Win2K. There is a reason Win2000 is NT 5 and WinXP is NT 5.1. Most of the changes were to the interface and the addition of some ease-of-use features. The underlying system is very similar.

Up until recently (Vista/Ribbon interface) and arguably even now, Microsoft has been able to provide more consistency than a lot of these Linux distros.

This has been a common meme for quite some time now but I find it completely illegitimate. Microsoft's interface has changed over time and they seem to have no interface guidelines, at least ones they stick to. On top of that almost all third party applications look and behave differently. Compare that with something like Gnome on Linux which has interface guidelines that are much more strictly enforced and many applications outside of Gnome core adhere to these guidelines and use the same toolkit. The more applications you install on a Microsoft operating system the less consistency you will have. Gnome provides many more applications than Microsoft and even more third party apps follow Gnome's HIG.

I don't really have too much time to mess around with my computer anymore but I'm using Gentoo and have very little issues. I don't think Ubuntu is the cure-all people seem to think it is. The Linux ecosystem has come a long way and is much easier to use in general than in the past. My installation is 4 years old and I'm not quite sure what the installation process is like now for Gentoo so I cannot comment on that but my point is that general usability is so much better for ALL distributions that even a source based distro is relatively easy to use and maintain. The most time consuming part of maintaining my system is reading the new options when I "make oldconfig" for a new kernel. Using a source distro is still not for everyone but it's amazing how simple it has become. I would be surprised to learn that any of the binary distributions would be difficult for someone to figure out.

I get your point but IE9 isn't required to get HTML5 on XP. There are other browsers out there that support HTML5 that also run on XP. There is even an HTML5 capable browser that runs on Win 9x and the large share that Firefox now garners is proof that people will swtich if there is a good reason to.

The only company that consistently does exactly what it says and and continues to blow people away with the quality of their products is Apple.

Are you serious? I don't count failing motherboards, antenna's that don't work, and insecure operating systems as "quality".

Now while at the same time Steve Jobs will get on stage and pull the future right out of his back pocket and "Oh, by the way, you can pick up one of these Monday morning."

You've got to be kidding me. The only thing Jobs does well is make a product that a trained monkey could use in a slim, easy on the eyes package. What exactly is revolutionary about any of the products Apple has produced?

It was very much a social networking platform. You had groups of people in your network that you could share things like media with. The benefit over other social networking systems was that it had very fine grained control of who had access to what. It wasn't setup like a facebook to be strictly a social networking site so I could see where it could seem like something else entirely but it definitely had all the elements of a social networking site. It just worked completely differently and had many more capabilities like real time collaboration that made it more than just a social networking site. Unfortunately it was very unintuitive and buggy as hell as people have already mentioned.

Isn't the term "true religion" an oxymoron?

Or maybe there is a difference between systemic voter intimidation and a couple of nutjobs standing in front of a polling place. You do realize the idiot with the baton was charged with a crime right? I see race-baiting as a tactic is alive as ever with the right wing.